Among School Children, by W B Yeats

“Among School Children” was published in W B Yeats’s 1928

collection “The Tower”, although it is known that it was written on 14
June 1926, with a prose draft having been prepared in March of that
year.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) wrote poetry throughout his life, and
he was also a major influence on Ireland’s cultural renaissance during
the years when the Irish Republic was being created. When the Irish
Free State was established in 1922 he became a senator and in 1923 he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Hence he was able to
describe himself, in this poem, as “A sixty-year-old smiling public
man”.

As a senator, he interested himself in the development of Irish education,

and “Among School Children” has, as its starting point, an account of a
visit which he made to St Otteran’s School in Waterford, south-east
Ireland. This was a school that was based on the principles laid down by
Maria Montessori, who stressed the need for children to be allowed free
expression, within limits, and to learn from discovery as opposed to
instruction. Yeats clearly approved of this style of teaching, which he
terms “the best modern way” in this poem.

The poem

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age—
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage—
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Discussion

“Among School Children” comprises eight stanzas, each of eight lines of

iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme ABABABCC. This is a
standard form known as “ottava rima”, and is one which Yeats used
elsewhere (e.g. “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”). However, the
formality of the verse form is softened by Yeats’s use of half-rhymes as
well as full rhymes. The final couplets are usually full rhymes, but this is
not a fixed rule.

After the scene-setting first stanza, in which the poet talks about walking
through “the long schoolroom” in which various activities are
happening, his mind wanders on to other matters. In particular, the sight
of young children at their desks sparks a train of thought that leads to the
woman who had occupied his thoughts and emotions for much of his
life, namely the actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he had
first met when he was 23 and to whom he had proposed marriage at least
five times but without success. She married someone else in 1903.

The references in the second stanza are to the legend of Leda and the
Swan (“a Ledaean body”) and Plato’s “Symposium”, which propounded
the idea that the gods created men and women by splitting a near-
spherical (or egg-like) shape into two halves. The passion of the sexes is
thus a series of attempts to regain this lost unity. In Yeats’s mind, he and
Maud Gonne should have been “… the yolk and white of the one shell”.

In the third stanza it is clear that the poet’s stream of consciousness has
taken him far away from the matter at hand. The intensity of his past
feelings for Maud Gonne are brought home to him forcibly when he
imagines a child in the classroom to be a reincarnation of Maud as she
would have been at that age: “She stands before me as a living child”.
There is also another reference to the Leda myth in “For even daughters
of the swan …”. Leda’s rape by Zeus in the form of a swan (which had
been dramatically represented in Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan”)
had led to the birth of Helen, whose beauty had been the root cause of
the Trojan War and to whom Maud Gonne had been likened in Yeats’s
much earlier poem “No Second Troy”.
The fourth stanza begins with Maud still firmly in Yeats’s consciousness
but now it is “Her present image”. She was a year younger than Yeats
(thus 59 to his 60) and, by 1926, was living quietly as a widow in
Dublin. Yeats had also been married for nine years by this time (to
Georgie Hyde-Lees), but that did not stop him wondering about what
might have been had Maud accepted him. She is now “hollow of cheek”,
and Yeats imagines an image from a Renaissance painting (the
“Quattrocento finger” could be a reference to Leonardo da Vinci). He
also allows himself a moment of reminiscence to his own previous
“pretty plumage” (he had jet-black hair as a young man), but then snaps
back to the present (“enough of that”) and continues to “smile on all that
smile” as he admits to himself that he must appear to the children to be
“a comfortable kind of old scarecrow”.

In the fifth stanza Yeats’s thoughts veer completely away from Maud
and focus instead on his own mother, who would have been “youthful”
(aged 24) at the time of his own birth in 1865. He wonders what she
would have thought had she been able to see how her son had turned out.
Would she have regarded him as adequate “compensation” for the pain
of childbirth and all the inconveniences of bringing him up? Yeats
leaves the question unanswered.

The sixth stanza leaps back even further to wonder about the thoughts of
Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras, all of whom had theories about
education. An element of humour is introduced in the case of Aristotle,
who is mentioned as inflicting corporal punishment “Upon the bottom of
a king of kings”, this being a reference to his role of tutor to the boy who
would become known to history as Alexander the Great. However, the
point of this stanza is draw a parallel between the poet’s own scarecrow-
like appearance and that of his forebears as educators, all of whom
would turn into “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird”. He seems
to be saying that perhaps he should not regard his role as being
unimportant and that “scarecrows” can still make a difference.
In the seventh stanza Yeats draws parallels between the religious
devotions of the nuns who run the school and the devotion that the
mothers of the children have towards their offspring.  He makes the
point that the children are every bit as worthy of worship as the images
of marble or bronze. They are the receptacles of a holy presence and
symbols of “heavenly glory”.

The eighth stanza leads on from the seventh and serves to pose questions
rather than supply answers. Yeats uses images of blossoming and
dancing to symbolise the life that is burgeoning in the children and
which is being nurtured physically by the children’s mothers and
intellectually by the nuns. However, such freedom is only possible when
“the body is not bruised”, either by “beauty born out of its own despair”
(a reference back to Maud Gonne) or “blear-eyed wisdom” caused by
too much emphasis on study.

Yeats is aware that wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing, and
the whole poem has been about contrasting forms of knowledge, some
of which have led to wise outcomes and some have not. Life is a dance
but, because the individual is engaged in the dance and cannot see it
from the outside, it is impossible, as the last line states, to “know the
dancer from the dance”.

The question is also posed in the shape of a chestnut tree, of which the
individual might be one of leaf, blossom or bole, progressing from one
to the other throughout life. The young children are dancing, fluttering
leaves who might well blossom as Maud Gonne did in Yeats’s memory.
He has reached the solidity of “bole”, being the “public man” who is
part of the structure that supports the leaves and blossoms.

“Among School Children” is a poem that repays re-reading, because

there is a lot of meaning that can be gleaned from it and which is not
apparent at first glance. It incorporates elements of myth and symbolism,
combined with personal thoughts and memories. It gives the impression
of wandering off at tangents, but it is in fact a closely controlled piece of
 work in which every part relates to the whole. It is a complex poem that
was subtly and skilfully crafted by a master of his art who knew exactly
what he was doing.

 Owlcation»
 Humanities»
 Literature

Analysis of Poem Among School

Children by W.B.Yeats
Updated on April 3, 2019

Andrew Spacey 
 more

Andrew has a keen interest in all aspects of poetry and writes extensively on the
subject. His poems are published online and in print.
Contact Author

W.B.Yeats | Source

W.B.Yeats and A Summary of Among School Children

Among School Children is one of Yeats' later poems and focuses on human potential, how we as
creative beings can work towards a unity of body and soul to fulfil that potential.

 The poem deals with several major issues: contrasting youth and old age, school work and life
wisdom, love and physical pain, intellect and artistic expression.
  Overall, the theme is that of essential change, how a person deals with the passage of time,
desire, ideals and how that person works towards harmony and union.
 The first five stanzas explore youth, old age and love from a personal perspective; the latter
three becoming more impersonal as the speaker attempts to reach a unifying vision.
 Each stanza is a progressive step towards what is ultimately a question concerning expression
and complete harmony of a human life.
 The ottava rima form in this poem works to create a sense of unity, but the mix of full and
imperfect rhyme isn't fully tuned to this ideal. Note that the first 6 stanzas are complete within
themselves, end stopped or given a question mark; each is a separate topic but gradually they
build up to stanzas 7 & 8 which are connected by semi-colon - the last stanza freeing the
speaker from cycles of toil and intellectual disappointment.
In 1922 Yeats became a senator in the Irish Free State parliament and part of his remit was to sit on
an educational committee and investigate schools. The Irish Catholic Church ran many of them and
it was on such an official visit in 1926 to St Otteran's in Waterford, run by the Sisters of Mercy, that
Yeats had the idea for this poem.

In a diary entry for March 26th 1926 he wrote :

'School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfil their
own dreams or even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never
happens.'

Among School Children is one of several poems Yeats wrote dealing with the relationship of body to
soul. Other poems include To A Child Dancing in the Wind, 1919, The Mask, Ego Dominus Tuus,
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes, A Crazed Girl, A Dialogue of Self and Soul.

Meaning Of Words in Poem Among School

Children
Stanza 2, line 9: Ledaean body - a woman the speaker has known, Maud Gonne in
real life, who Yeats loved but never married. The Greek myth in which Leda is raped
by Zeus in the form of a swan is the inspiration. (see Yeats' poem Leda and the
Swan).

Stanza 2, lines 15/16: In Plato's Symposium legend has it that humans were cut in
two by Zeus because they were too powerful. Since then humans strive for love by
regaining the whole, hence yolk and egg back into the shell to become one loving
whole.
 Among School Children - Meaning of
Quattrocento & Honey of Generation
Stanza 4 line 26: Quattrocento finger - literally 'four hundred' relating to the 1400s
when Italian art and culture 1400-1499 began what became known as the
Renaissance.

Stanza 5 lines 33-36 : Honey of generation - phrase taken from Porphyry's essay
'The Cave of the Nymphs'. Honey is seen as a drug that nullifies pre-natal freedom
or as signifier of sensual pleasure. Greek philosopher Porphyry lived 232-305.

Among School Children

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age—
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage—
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Analysis of Among School Children Stanza by Stanza

Stanza 1

The first stanza sets up a scene of contrasts. Here is the speaker visiting a school run by nuns. He is
observing and questioning, gaining answers from the nun and impressions from the children who are
busy at their tasks.

It becomes clear towards the end of the stanza that the speaker is aware of the age and generation
gap. He is 60 years old with limited time left, they are modern and have all their lives ahead of them.

Yeats at this time was a senator, an important official, and his duties involved the inspection of
schools, mostly run by the Catholic church.

That word cipher means to do arithmetic. It's not really used in that sense anymore.

Stanza 2

The first person narrative continues but changes tack as the speaker starts to dream, to think about
things past and present. Innocence is lost, but what will be the outcome?

The Ledaean body refers to the Greek myth Yeats wrote about in his poem Leda and the Swan.
Leda is raped by Zeus in the form of a swan and gives birth to Helen of Troy and Castor and Pollux.

As the speaker walks through the schoolroom he is thinking back to a woman he loved with a
youthful passion, a certain Maud Gonne (who refused Yeats's proposal to marry). She is the
Ledaean body, a beauty, who loses her innocence, who tells the tale of blame that changed
everything.

This is the speaker's fantasy, wishing to unite (in sensuality) with his first love, to become a complete
human.

 The idea comes from Plato's Symposium which tells of the legend of the origin of human love,
of how humans were cut in two by Zeus, the ancient Greek god, to reduce their power. And so,
to become whole a human being needs to find the other missing half (ie the yolk needs the
white of the egg).
The syntax - the way clauses and grammar is put together - is of interest in this stanza. It is one long
sentence, broken up into clauses by astute use of commas and a dash. Use of enjambment when a
line runs on into the next, alters the pace and momentum. Note line 11, which extends the usual
pentameter by two feet, becoming an iambic hexameter:

Told of / a harsh / reproof, / or tri / vial / event

Stanza 3
The speaker continues the imagining as he looks around, placing his beloved Maud Gonne in the
schoolroom, as a child, before innocence was lost. It's a challenging position to be in, to look back in
time and in the mind's eye see a woman he had a passion for become a child.

Yeats in real life found little satisfaction in love. Maud Gonne did not reciprocate, and he ended up
marrying a woman for something less than whole love.

In a sense this stanza is saying...education cannot prepare a human for life's essential emotional
lessons in love. There is a parallel between Yeats and Maud Gonne and the school children and
their future experiences as adults.

Little wonder that the speaker is driven wild by these provocative images in his head.

Stanza 4

That word Quattrocento relates to Italian art of the 15th century, so the speaker is becoming more
visual in his use of language, painting a picture of a classical Maud Gonne, now in the present, and
therefore old.

Lines 27 and 28 are particularly poignant because they portray this image of an old woman from the
15th century, who drinks wind and eats shadows as if they were meat - like someone out of a Celtic
fairytale.

Yeats as speaker is implying that Maud Gonne is now old and gaunt because of desires unfulfilled,
partly based on real life events - they did have brief intimacies but her reluctance to commit
permanently to Yeats affected him greatly.

The wind dries out, is a lost voice. And could it be that the shadows relate to those in Plato's Cave of
Unknowing?

The speaker is looking back at what might have been when he still had the looks and energy but
knows better than to feel sorry for past losses. He makes light of it, stays positive, admits
metaphorically he's relaxed in his role as an official scarecrow.

Stanza by Stanza Analysis of Among School Children

Stanza 5

This stanza focuses on motherhood and child bearing, the physical pain and labour of bringing a
child into the world - is it worth it when that child turns into an adult? Then having to bring up the
child knowing that it might never reach potential?

The phrase Honey of generation comes from the Greek philosopher Porphyry's essay on The Cave
of the Nymphs, where it signifies a drug, that which nullifies the memory of the pre-natal foetus

Yeats again uses one long sentence to detail the experience of the mother and ask one question of
value. How does the mother balance the physical aspect of delivery with that of maturity and growing
up?

How does the physical bond relate to the spiritual?

Stanza 6

There is a definite move away from the physical and personal - the speaker introduces three Greek
philosophers in an attempt to find answers.
  Plato thought that the world of nature is a copy of an ideal world of real forms or prototypes that
exist in a world transcending our own.
 Aristotle believed in investigation and dissected nature to find proofs. He was tutor to King
Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great, hence the taws, the whip.
 Pythagoras was held to be an incarnation of the god Apollo (hence the golden-thighed) and
thought the universe subject to mathematical laws, based on musical harmony, the music of the
spheres.
 The Muses are the nine sister goddesses ruling over song, poetry, the arts and sciences.
These great thinkers are all subject to aging; they become scarecrows like the speaker, despite their
theories and profound ideas.

Stanza 7

The speaker concentrates on the female gender, going back to the nun, the mother and eventually
the lover, Maud Gonne.

Religious people lie the nun worship ideal images, wanting perfection. Mothers dote on their children
naturally, seeing in them a perfect being. But sooner or later cracks start to appear and these ideals
disappoint, they too break hearts....

Yeats is building up to the climax of the eighth stanza, telling the reader that passion (his for Maud
Gonne), piety (the nun's and their images) and affection (the mother's for her child) will develop their
own ability to mock...it's self-born because of the intense longing for ideals.

Stanza 8

After seven stanzas the speaker eventually introduces that which will not result in heart-ache, pain
and disappointment but unity....this is a state where body mingles with soul and where natural
expression takes over from cerebral knowledge.

Yet, questions still persist. Why? The chestnut-tree is given, an example of beauty...the tree as a
whole labours to produce its blossom, each part necessary, reliant on the other for expression.

The body responds to music, the eye sharp and focused, the dance a creative, rhythmic expression
of body and soul.

The speaker is concluding enigmatically - it is the artist inside that prevails, learning from nature and
its own intuition, in harmony with the rhythm of discipline and form.

Physical love, lust, sex; religious feeling, the quest for an ideal; knowledge and theory and ideas are
all well and good but it's the solo dance, the way we express being that has to come through if we're
to avoid a sense of waste and despair.

What Literary /Poetic Devices Are In Among School Children?

Alliteration

When two or more words close together in a line start with the same consonant:

changed some childish....Plato's parable...thinking of that...stood so...finger fashion...pretty

plumage...sleep, shriek, struggle...drug decide...fingered upon a fiddle-stick...star sang...sticks to
scare...that passion, piety...mockers of man's...body is not bruised...beauty born...blossom or the
bole...dancer from the dance.

Alliteration brings texture and reinforces certain sounds for effect.

Assonance

When two or more words close together in a line have similar sounding vowels:

dream of a Ledaean...thinking of that fit...she but see...sixty or more winters...Upon the

bottom...golden-thighed Pythagoras...Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings...Old clothes...wisdom
out of midnight...

Caesura

A pause in a line, often midway through punctuation (but not always punctuation, it can occur
naturally in longer lines). For example, in lines 6 and 35:

In the best modern way- the children's eyes

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

Enjambment

When a line runs on into the next with no punctuation, carrying sense (meaning) and momentum.
For example, in lines 9-11:

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

Analysis of Among School Children - Rhyme and Metre (Meter in American

English)
Among School Children is a rhyming poem with 8 stanzas, each having eight lines, making 64 in
total.

Rhyme

The form is known as ottava rima, originating in Italy, made up of a cross rhyming sestet and
couplet, with rhyme scheme:

abababcc

Most of the rhymes are full, for example:

questioning/sing/everything ... wild/child.

But many are half rhyme, or imperfect rhyme:

upon/man....plays/taws/Pythagoras...birth/forth.

This reflects a tension between harmony (full rhyme) and discord (half and imperfect rhyme.

Metre (Meter in American English)

Ottava rima form is traditionally in iambic pentameter that is, each line should have five regular
iambic feet...daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM ...with the stress on the second syllable and
lines that rise.

Yeats however altered this pattern and although certain lines are pure iambic pentameter many
others are not. For example, here are the first four lines:

I walk / through the / long school / room quest / ioning;

A kind / old nun / in a / white hood / replies;

The chil / dren learn / to ci / pher and / to sing,

To stu / dy rea / ding-books / and hist / ories,

So, from the outset, pure iambic pentameter is not established. Read the first line and there is no
regular daDUM rhythm. The long vowels reinforce a sense of slowness and the last
word questioning falls away.

There is an iambic pentameter line - line 3 - and the clear regular beat can be heard as the children
go through their activity. The next line continues this but again the stress falls away with histories.

These three syllable end words continue, dispersed throughout the poem's sestet's:

everything/tragedy/heritage/reveries/Presences/blossomer

So look out for these lines that alter the basic iambic rhythm when you read the poem. They bring a
different pattern and pace to the poem, add interest and challenge the reader to negotiate lines with
added focus. For example:

World-fa / mous gol / den-thighed / Pythag / oras

Here we have a ten syllable line with five feet, so it is an iambic pentameter because it has three
iambs but watch out for the opening spondee (double stress) and ends with the quieter pyrrhic (no
stresses or hardly detectable stress).

And this example is of interest, line 43 from stanza 6:

Solid / er A / ristot / le played / the taws

Again, ten syllables and five feet, four of them iambic apart from the opening trochee (inverted iamb)
with stress on the first syllable.

Plus this line, line 33, Stanza 5:

What youth / ful moth / er, a shape / upon / her lap

This time there are eleven syllables which tells you that there is a different kind of foot in the line. It
comes midway and is an anapaest (dadaDUM) although the caesura - pause caused by the comma,
rather disguises it.

These subtle and not so subtle metrical changes help mix up the rhythms and in conjunction with
syntax help make this poem a joy to digest.